Goodbye Jackson Arn, I'll Miss You

What the heck happened to Jackson Arn? The New Yorker’s zero tolerance for inappropriate conduct is what happened, apparently: see “New Yorker Cuts Ties With Critic After Complaints About Behaviour,” The New York Times, March 17, 2025. It’s too bad. Arn is a wonderful art writer. When he started at The New Yorker, he was new to me. But he quickly won me over with his fresh, piquant, perceptive descriptions. This one, for example:

None of the shapes or colors in “Pasture” (1958), a smallish plot of mainly red and green threads, would be out of place on a roll of Christmas wrapping paper. The trick is that each component lingers long enough to make any change feel like an event; checkerboard red-and-green switches to green-on-black, then green-on-black but with stutters of white and red. Patterns unfold horizontally, but every so often a twisted pair of vertical threads (it’s called a leno weave) slashes its way out of the grid. An invisible logic, mysterious but never precious, presides. Most visual art addresses whoever happens to be looking at it. “Pasture” stares straight through you, at some distant, tranquil future in which primordial beauty is the only kind left. [“Warp Speed,” April 22 & 29, 2024].

That “slashes its way out of the grid” is brilliant. The whole piece is brilliant – one among many that Arn wrote in the short time he was with the magazine. I’m going to miss him. Is there any way he could be given a second chance? 

Credit: The above portrait of Jackson Arn is from newyorker.com.